Since they are total hacks and since they wouldn't want to do anything to expose Dear Leader to ridicule, 60 Minutes didn't include this bit of Barackaganda in their recent Obama interview.

They did screw up and include it in the transcript Heads will roll.

Have a terrifying glimpse into the minds behind The Teleprompter:

President Obama suggested, during his recent CBS interview, that his domestic and foreign policy achievements over his first term surpass any other United States president, “with the possible exceptions” of Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

“I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln,” Obama told Steve Kroft, “just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.”

They were discussing the Bush era tax cuts. Stein noted that during the four years after the tax cuts were implemented, tax revenue increased and that we had record-breaking amounts of tax money rolling into the Treasury. (Thomas Sowell has also noted that the percentile who received the tax break then paid more $$ in taxes afterwards, and also paid a higher percentage of the total taxes. If people don't have to give the government as much money, people can then invest their money in things that aren't stupid or harmful and that eventually creates benefits for everyone. The government eventually gets more money.)

Callahan disagreed. He stated that there was a four-year period in the Clinton era where taxes were a higher percentage of GDP than ever before, and that tax revenue was near 20% of GDP during that era.

Let's assume that Stein and Callahan are both correct. More dollars, adjusted for inflation, came in after the Bush tax cuts. But a higher percentage of taxes to GDP came in during the Clinton era.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

49) NPR is a very elitist and in this case white institution that I think is struggling with the changing demographics of American society. And it struggles with the idea that there are capable thinkers and journalist and people who don’t fit into some box. — Juan Williams on NPR

48) Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he’s lecturing us about how America’s gone “soft”? Really? — Jonah Goldberg Well, some of us haven't been working very hard for Dear Leader like we did back in 2008, have we?

47) Why does the left hate free speech? Because they don’t know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don’t know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting “shut up”… when they aren’t prissily imploring everyone to be “civil.” — Ann Althouse

45) There used to be no income inequality in China because everyone was poor. This is a tradeoff you accept for growth and freedom. — Michele Caruso-Cabrera

43) Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor. — Walter Williams

42) Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large. — Thomas Sowell

40) If you’ve ever known anyone with a serious addiction, the easiest thing for friends and family to do is pretend it’s not a big deal. Who wants to have a confrontation? Far easier to let things slide and have a good time. “Let’s have a nice Thanksgiving without any arguments, OK?”
The tea party is like the cousin who’s been through AA and refuses to pretend anymore. As a result, he spoils everyone’s good time. For the enablers, and others in denial, he’s the guy ruining everything, not the drunk.
Uncle Sam is the drunk and the tea partiers are the annoyingly sober — and a bit self-righteous — cousin. Measured by spending, and adjusted for inflation, the federal government has increased by more than 50 percent in 10 years. Some have enabled the drunken spending, others continue to deny it’s even a problem.
The tea party is sounding the wake-up call. If America didn’t have a problem, then there really would be good cause to be furious with the forces of sobriety. Nobody likes a party-pooper, especially the people hooked on partying. — Jonah Goldberg

39) Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you’re a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam’s fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway. — Mark Steyn

38) [The Tea Party] has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone. — Ed Driscoll This is my candidate for quote of the year.

37) (He) doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history. When other pols are trying, failing, learning, while climbing up the middle rungs of the ladder, he got a pass. — Mickey Kaus

36) The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians. — Thomas Sowell

34) (Obama) keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs. — Steve Wynn, who probably won't change his ways.

33) It’s no coincidence that trust in government is at an all-time low now that the size of government is at an all-time high. — Paul Ryan

31) I give the president credit for at least one thing. He’s proven that someone can deserve a Nobel prize less than Al Gore. — Tim Pawlenty

27) In his early activist days, Barack Obama the community organizer sued banks to ease their lending practices. Now his administration is suing banks for issuing risky mortgages. — Jim Hoft

26) Well, “The Washington post” three weeks ago had this investigation and they said that President Obama has now raised more money from Wall Street and the banks for this election cycle than all — than all eight Republicans combined. I don’t want to say that, because if that’s the truth, that Wall Street already has their man and his name is Barack Obama, then we’ve got a much bigger problem. — Michael Moore, finally going to Clues R Us and getting one.

23) Question: How much do you have to invest in the future before you’ve spent it and no longer have one? — Mark Steyn

22) All of which raises another question: If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it? — Michael Barone, in reference to the people and organizations who supported the passage of Obamacare getting in line for Obamacare waivers.

21) My name’s Ronnie Bryant, and I’m a mine operator…. I’ve been issued a [state] permit in the recent past for [waste water] discharge, and after standing in this room today listening to the comments being made by the people…. [pause] Nearly every day without fail — I have a different perspective — men stream to these [mining] operations looking for work in Walker County. They can’t pay their mortgage. They can’t pay their car note. They can’t feed their families. They don’t have health insurance. And as I stand here today, I just … you know … what’s the use? I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you. — Ronnie Bryant as he goes Galt.

18) My next door neighbor’s two dogs have created more shovel ready jobs than this administration. — Gary Johnson And guess what, boys and girls, friends and neighbors? Gary Johnson has declared his intention to run for President as a Libertarian. This is gonna be GREAT !!

16) Let’s pass a bill to cover the moon with yogurt that will cost $5 trillion today. And then let’s pass a bill the next day to cancel that bill. We could save $5 trillion. — Paul Ryan That's a reference to the Dems proposal that we pay for some bullshit think with savings from the ending of the Iraq war. One problem....the Iraq war was never paid for either.

15) Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored. — Thomas Sowell

13) With a few exceptions, foremost among them the New York Post, the coverage of OWS protests compared to the coverage of tea-party protests is the worst media double standard in recent history. Nothing compares, because nothing else involves this much distortion on both ends of the coverage. It’s not just that most press outlets (like the protesters themselves) look the other way at depravity happening inside Obamaville, it’s that for years they treated the tea-party movement as some sort of feral mob that was forever on the brink of rampaging through the streets — like, say, Occupy Oakland just did. If you missed it when I posted it last week, go watch the ad the DNC ran in August 2009 when tea partiers first started showing up to town halls on ObamaCare. That set the tone. We began the year with tea-party pols being smeared as killers over a shooting they had nothing to do with and we end it with actual rapes being shrugged off by the press because they’re bad PR for a movement they support. Disgrace. — Allahpundit

9) We are living in a bizarre moment in history. Our establishment–the press, the academy, all unions, most politicians, many in business who have skin in the Ponzi game–assure us that borrowing trillions of dollars to finance wasteful spending, while sticking our children with the tab plus interest, is perfectly sensible. On the other hand, believing that we should live within our means is? Crazy! — John Hinderaker

8) Those who can do. Those who can’t form a supercommittee. — Mark Steyn

7) Medicare in particular will run out of money, and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up. — Barack Obama

This next one isn't relative to any Free Minds/Free Markets position at all, but I like the way Mayor Nutter expresses himself here. I know that if I have to interview one more kid with a visible ass crack, I'm going to give my HR lady some suspenders to issue to every gangsta who enters my office.
6) Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ‘cause you look like you’re crazy. You have damaged your own race. — Mayor Michael A. Nutter

5) With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. — Rand Paul

4) This deal is a sugar-coated Satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see. — Rep. Emanuel Cleaver on the debt ceiling increase deal

3) This one, #3, was pretty good, but it was uttered by Newt Gingrich. I try not to quote Newt in a positive context. You'll have to hit the link at the top to read it.

2) The total present value of payments expected under Social Security and Medicare beyond what is expected to be collected under current tax laws is about $100 trillion. One way to put that amount of money in context is to note that it is about twice the amount of all the net private assets that exist in America today. To answer cw’s question directly, the best back-of-envelope estimate is that meeting this unfunded portion of our Social Security and Medicare commitments would require roughly an immediate 80 percent increase in federal income taxes, sustained forever. — Jim Manzi

1) #1 was some macho Alpha Geronimo Tango Foxtrot radio transmissions from the Navy Seal who shot Bin Laden.

I like this one, from Joe Biden, much better. Please, please, please watch the whole thing, and revel in the boundless glory of Biden giving the (now-disgraced) Jon Corzine full credit for helping write the Porkulus Act. If you're wondering why the woman in the back is wearing a hard hat, it's to protect her from the bullshit falling from the heavens.

Here's Corzine a few years later, admitting that he has no idea what happened to 1.2 billion dollars of other people's money entrusted to his investment firm. Hell, if you can legally blow 3/4 of a trillion in Porkulus on turtle tunnels, union giveaways, African Genital-Washing programs and other junk, what's 1.2 billion?

These aren't necessarily the quotes I would've nominated, but I didn't think to save them all year. Many thanks to John Hawkins for pulling this list together.

In a rare lapse into bad taste, Delta Magazine has published one of my tales in their November/December 2011 issue. That's the Delta Magazine about the Mississippi Delta, the center of the cultural universe, not the magazine about the insiginificant airline. (I'd sent them another article, but a hunting magazine accepted it first.. I asked if they were interested in anything else. They replied "750 words about Christmas". I sent them this one night and they accepted it the next morning.) My great friend Patricia Starnes (soon to be Farrish) took the pic at Leo Allred's store on Beale Street in Memphis. Here's how it looked in the mag, as opposed to what I sent in. Hope you folks like it. Merry Christmas !!!

I can only remember one white Christmas from my Mississippi Delta childhood. Not because of the snow, which was the largest we’d ever seen, not because the snow was particularly beautiful on our plowed-under rice fields, which looked like someone had sprinkled a thin layer of white sugar on a Mississippi Mud Cake, but because of how my father decided to celebrate the snowfall.

He took us snow skiing.

The Mississippi Delta is flat and snow skiing requires a hill. Our nearest hills were the on-ramps for the I-20/Highway 61 intersection in Vicksburg. Eudora Welty once complained that the Mississippi Delta was maddening, and couldn’t imagine spending days with nothing to see but the horizon. (I tell friends about the time my dog ran away, and three days later I could still see him.) It’s flat.

So Delta natives water ski.

My father probably taught two hundred kids how to water ski. During summers for a couple of decades, he tread water in Beulah lake, supporting his students through failed attempts until they “got it” and skied. After each success, he would dog-paddle back to shore with his wet comb-over hanging triumphantly past his left ear lobe, grab something to eat, and then get back in the lake to teach another one.

But when my little brother Steven came along, teaching had become a challenge. Keeping unwieldy skis and someone else’s fat child on top of the water was no job for a 40-year-old. When Daddy saw a pair of “training skis” at a sporting goods store, he bought them.

Imagine a pair of skis, much shorter and wider than usual, connected at the toes with an 18-inch long board. A traditional ski rope and handle went from this board to the skier’s hands. We could tie this thing behind a boat and pull a screaming child all over the lake on the first try. Steven was no more than four years old the first time he got on them, and he instantly got the hang of it.

Back to our White Christmas…. We enjoyed playing in the snow, but we couldn't go into town to see our friends.

After the mandatory snowmen and snow angels, we went inside and dared to say that we were bored. Our mother shot back at us with one of her anecdotes about growing up dirt poor in Yazoo City, and spending her winters sitting in a semicircle with her sisters and spitting on a radiator to see whose saliva would disappear first.

Daddy told us to stop our bellyachin', get dressed for the snow, and come outside. Waiting for us in the rice field in front of the house were the training skis tied to the back of a Massey-Ferguson 1800 series 4-wheel drive tractor.

The Massey Ferguson 1800 series could pull anything. They didn't get stuck, no matter how deep the mud.
We’d long suspected this, but at that moment we knew. We had the greatest… father…. ever.

I got on the skis first, my younger siblings crawled into the cab with Daddy, and we were off. The tractor took off across the frozen field, and I was towed along about 30 yards behind. I could feel every frozen clod underneath the skis, but Lord Have Mercy, it was fun. Once we got up to the cruising speed of 35 miles an hour, it was downright exhilarating.

I could lean back against the rope handle and go wide left or right. When the tractor made a quick turn, it would fling me past the “wake” like a slingshot, and then snatch a knot in my neck when the slack disappeared. The other downside were the unplanned exits from the skis. Hitting frozen mud at 35 miles an hour HURT.

My sisters and brother got their turns, and soon the field had been rutted enough to give us some nice jump ramp opportunities.

(I just got off the phone with my little brother, who is now a history professor at Mississippi College. He remembers us doing this, but was too young to remember details. However, he says that when he sees the "Jackass" show on TV, where a deathproof gang of idiotic males attempt ridiculous stunts and expose themselves to bodily harm just for fun, he thinks to himself, "Yep. That's how we grew up.")

We rode those skis for hours. If YouTube had been around, movies from that day would've been passed all around the world, titled "Mississippi Ski Slope". Why no one suffered a broken leg is a mystery. The gravel road we lived on didn't get much traffic, but anyone who saw us stopped to watch.

There were families who went to Europe that Christmas. There were young Olympians skiing down the Matterhorn. Aspen Colorado was probably swarming with what would soon be called Yuppies, wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of special clothing and equipment.

We were zipping around a muddy field of frozen mud behind a tractor, in the flatlands between Merigold and Drew Mississippi. We wouldn't have traded places with anyone in the world.

Merry Christmas ! It's what you make of it.

Put down this magazine till tonight. Go outside. Find some kids and a field and nail some skis together.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Marvel Variants descended from his corporate Valhalla a few days ago and visited my office.
He noticed this book on one of the shelves:

I mentioned that it's a useful corrective to anyone still enthralled with the idea that the State can be all, provide all, and cure all. The book nails down the Marxist Body Count at 100 million. Mr. Variants opined that he generally doesn't give Marxist apologists the time of day. But I seem to be surrounded by them. And hell, I occasionally need somebody to talk to.

There are living, breathing people on this planet, individuals who can feed themselves without making a mess, who still believe in the legend of a benevolent Fidel Castro. I've been in homes that have copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book on the shelf, a relic from the owner's "hippie days". My little brother, a history perfesser, has casually mentioned that he worked with a couple of Marxist academics at a Methodist university in Tennessee. Yeah, you expect to encounter some tweedy academics floundering around in the post-Marxist mist within some Ivy League Hot Houses and Reservations, but at Methodist schools in Tennessee? In the year 2011? WTF??? What color are the skies in their worlds?

I've never understood why Nazi sympathizer idiots were treated with far more scorn than Marxist idiots. The Commie Death Camps achieved ten times the death rate as their fascist competitors. What gives?

Here's a partial listing of the worst of the Marxist Apologists and their output, along with the work of a few others who've documented their delusions. I'm posting this mostly so I can find this stuff later. We owe this guy for putting it all together.
The pieces with an asterisk are the "denial" works. The rest are commentary.

In the aftermath of the Cambodian killing fields, a leading Sovietologist shows how the “progressive” left supported totalitarian terror and mass slaughter while cultivating a self-image of pristine innocence.

* Edward Herman and Gareth Porter, The Myth of the Hue Massacre [PDF]
Porter and Herman denied the Viet Cong massacre of thousands in the South Vietnamese city of Hue - even though the perpetrators repeatedly admitted their responsibility.

Far-leftists deny the post-war bloodbath and reprisal policy, urging that the dictatorship “should be hailed for its moderation and for its extraordinary effort to achieve reconciliation among all of its people.”

Important study documenting the far-left academic campaign to defend the Khmer Rouge during the horrors in Cambodia. The intellectual deniers of mass murder included Gareth Porter, George Hildebrand, Malcolm Caldwell, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman.

The shocking record of scholar Ben Kiernan, who supported the Khmer Rouge during the slaughter and then defended the brutal dictatorship imposed by the Vietnamese communists. Kiernan has been described as “poacher-turned-gamekeeper in the field of genocide.”

Congressional hearings in which David Chandler expressed agnosticism about the bloodbath reports and Gareth Porter openly denied them. Porter’s performance was considered so disgraceful that one Senator compared him to apologists for Nazism.

Marko Attila Hoare, Srebrenica Deniers Get Their Mucky Paws on Rwanda
Noam Chomsky’s former coauthor Edward Herman and his new sidekick David Peterson have compounded their denials of the Srebrenica massacre by claiming that the Rwanda genocide never happened.

- Amnesty International
Christopher Archangelli, Amnesty For Iraq
Argues that the leftist “human rights group” suppressed Baathist atrocities so that it could concentrate on denunciations of America and Britain.

In just one year, “Amnesty produced more country reports on the United States than on Cuba, Syria, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia combined.”

Does this seem like overkill, to continue throwing up Red Scare warning flags this late in the game? Maybe so. But check out this recent statement by someone named Simon Winchester, remarking on the recent death of Kim Jong-Il:

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out - its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Yeah. They're still out there.Come back, Joe McCarthy!! We still need you !!

Sunday, December 18, 2011

First, regulating cellphone use is not a federal responsibility, even on federal roads. This is not an issue that Washington has the authority to address.

Second, there’s no compelling reason for it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 3,092 traffic deaths last year involved distracted drivers. But using a cell phone is only one of many driver distractions. Eating and drinking while behind the wheel are two others, and they are far more dangerous than yapping on a phone.

In fact, a 2009 NHTSA study found that 80% of all car wrecks are caused by drivers eating or drinking — not cellphone use — with coffee-guzzling the top offender.

Then there’s this. According to federal data, traffic deaths have fallen from 2.1 per 100 million vehicle miles in 1990, when virtually no one had a cellphone, to 1.1 in 2009, when almost everyone does.

The National Transportation Safety Board wants a complete ban on cellphone use while driving, even on hands-free calls. Some will protest this as yet another government encroachment on freedom, but we should think twice before rocking the boat here.

After all, have you considered how lucky we are that the government lets us drive cars at all?

Imagine if cars hadn’t been around for a century, but instead were just invented today. Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use? It’s an era of bans on incandescent bulbs; if you suggested putting millions of internal-combustion engines out there, you’d get looks like you were Hitler proposing the Final Solution.

Even aside from pollution, the government wouldn’t allow the risks to safety. . . . Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety. They had different equations related to human life then: We could lose 10,000 men in a single battle in a war and call it a victory.

We’re talking foolhardy people who eventually sent men to the moon strapped to a giant rocket that had less computational power than it takes to calculate the trajectory of an Angry Bird. Their kids dangled from jungle gyms over pavement.

Face it: We’re just not those people anymore. We don’t do dangerous things where lots of people could be hurt . . . even if they’re really cool and fun ideas. You can say we value human life more now, but it’s probably more apt to say we’re much sissier.